Book Review

Joan of Arc, probably the most famous person from the medieval ages, has had the contours of her life played out in countless incarnations across the arts. Inspired by divine visions, the historical Joan helped France repel the English during the Hundred Years’ War before her capture by the English and execution at age nineteen. Later, she was canonized by the Catholic church and anointed a French national hero; more recently, she has emerged as a transgender icon, supported by her historically documented insistence on donning male clothing. JOAN, Jake Rose’s debut, is a reimagination of Joan of Arc as a prism for queer experience. Marrying epic breadth with lyric intimacy, JOAN dramatizes Joan’s life story to enact the embrace, and then rejection, of identity and its confinements.

Structured as a book-length poem divided into four sections, JOAN is spoken entirely from the first-person perspective of the historical Joan. Although page-length blocks of text often ring with coherence of individual poems, a lack of titles helps to foster a sense of intimacy between the reader and Joan-as-lyric-speaker. JOAN opens with a section titled “Domremy 1412 – 1425,” which corresponds to the historical Joan’s birthplace and introduces us to her as a young mystic. The imagery of this section derives generously from the natural world, and the run-on syntax scrubs the artificial borders that govern human perception:

I spent all my loneliness with you here

speaking in turn to the isle of grass

the velvet eared cattle & the sawgrass spines

as the coin of sun declined each day I closed the

gates to the field & tomatoes grew in the dark

like the blushing minds of yawning children

guttered candles spilled their pinebrushed light

and bells spelled out the path to vespers

a cold wind blew in blusters upon my spine

Rose’s liberal use of consonance (the fricative “sh” linking “blushing minds” with “pinebrushed light”) and assonance (“guttered” and “blusters”) suggests that Joan perceives the world with unusual attunement to its beauty and interconnection, supporting the notion that she is a mystic with particular insight into the natural world of God’s creation.

Even in this prelapsarian world, however, Joan manifests an unease with her own body and a desire to escape the constraints of her physical form:

I would lie down on a plateau of my own longing

and be eaten by weeping wolves forever to escape them

or at least until the sun set I would hide

like a child in summer if I really thought I could

evade my flesh but some part of me always sticks

to the world’s surface

Joan’s imagined desire to “evade my flesh” foreshadows her rejection of female clothing and decision to cross-dress in masculine attire. It also provides a metaphor linking the discomfort of being a mystic in a secular world with the experience of being gender nonconforming in a largely cis-gender world. To possess a mystic’s insight and sensibility while living amongst mundane humanity, Rose suggests, is to feel a discomfort akin to that of living inside an inaccurately gendered body.

Following historical events, JOAN charts Joan’s journey to Orleans and Reims, where she helped secure the Dauphin’s coronation, and then her capture and imprisonment by the British. The poem chronicles Joan’s ordeal facing interrogation by the clerical judges (“I spoke barely above my own exhaustion each answer / like an entrance into which I was being erased,”) as well as the interrogation itself. In a departure from its earlier lyrical style, JOAN includes a section, derived from Joan of Arc’s preserved trial notes and spanning several pages, that captures the dehumanizing effects of relentless questioning:

Asked if I believed myself subject

Asked if I had a command from my voices not to submit myself

Asked why I had taken male clothing

Asked for what reason I had taken it

Asked to speak truthfully

Asked if I would submit

Asked if I would submit

Joan in prison is cut off from the natural world that had been a source of lyric inspiration. Like Richard II in Shakespeare’s play of the same name, imprisonment seems to compel Joan to recreate reality: “when I get angry my fist curls like a scroll in an old violin / when I am sad the sawgrass grows sweet / and the wind drinks buckets of my sleep.” But the most pronounced effect of imprisonment is the emergence of an insouciant tone that seems at odds with the grim realities of Joan’s incarceration:

I care each time I give up & regain

what small clarity I can recover then

spend it looking back on my failure

and bemoaning it again ha ha ha

it’s reflexive now I expect to be

punished & I don’t care

These moments of insouciance are jarring and seem to track an increasingly concerted effort to defy and escape the confines of identity and situation. Joan as an icon and martyr might be expected to undergo extremes of ennobling suffering during her incarceration; as a real-life figure, she might be expected to feel fear. The flippant tone (“ha ha ha,” “I don’t care”) functions to subvert these expectations.

Ultimately, Joan’s desire for freedom includes freedom from language itself. In a striking metaphor, Joan connects the way language both sustains and restricts her (literally as a verbal construct) to the way ideas of gender sustain and restrict even those who seek to escape it altogether:

it’s still possible to die androgynous

but not within language but not

without language where my honesty

is never twice the same & must

be caught every night

Towards the end of JOAN, Rose includes a series of stills from Carl Dreyer’s 1928 film, The Passion of Joan of Arc, depicting Joan stepping over a threshold. If one follows the logic of Joan’s biography, this should correspond to Joan’s trip to the stake. But the stills derive from a point in Dreyer’s film well before Joan’s final trek. Indeed, JOAN ultimately omits Joan’s execution altogether. The threshold that Rose constructs via the stills from The Passion of Joan of Arc seems to offer an alternative to the one prescribed to the historical and cultural Joan; this one may lead her out of prison into a “queering” of history in which a version of Joan successfully resists all confines—corporeal, historical, and linguistic.

Shortly before the stills from Dreyer’s film is a section in which Joan seems to disavow her own identity:

I am inventing a Joan now

who could survive this suffering

I also invented a Joan

who was guilty &

one who was innocent

they are lovers now fucking

in the cell above

To invent a multiplicity of identities is to commit to none. JOAN charts a strange and deliberate journey from the lyric intimacy of a religious mystic to the tonally disruptive musings of an imprisoned solipsist. In the book’s final stretch, Joan appears to speak from a position of freedom, apparently having transcended the determiniations of place, time, history, gender, and language. JOAN’s last lines generously invite the reader to participate in this liberation:

I kinda want this poem to get blown open

I kinda want to feel blown open

I kinda want you to see me now

because that’s how much I believe in